


you buried your demons in a shallow grave

by chromaberrant, stupiddragon



Series: shallow grave [2]
Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: Failed Android Revolution (Detroit: Become Human), Gen, Illustrated
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-08
Updated: 2019-07-08
Packaged: 2020-06-24 09:53:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,132
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19721296
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chromaberrant/pseuds/chromaberrant, https://archiveofourown.org/users/stupiddragon/pseuds/stupiddragon
Summary: The world teeters on a precipice that it managed to step back from one year ago. Nines and Gavin find themselves at a tipping point, out of their depth and out of balance.





	you buried your demons in a shallow grave

**Author's Note:**

> (slides in fifteen minutes late with a starbucks) ay yo we are celebrating the first anniversary of the [New ERA Discord server](https://discord.gg/GqvNzUm), and this fic is part of the big bang we put together to commemorate that! 
> 
> Art brought to you by Seb aka stupiddragon/[sebblaze](https://www.instagram.com/sebblaze/) on ig!

**NOV 10TH,** 2039  
08:47 PM  
MELVINDALE, MI

“Got ‘em,” comes detective Gavin Reed’s frantic mutter. Nines’ eyes linger for a second on the curl of his mouth, the teeth bared in a vindictive grin. “Motherfucker, we got ‘em, call in reinforcements. This is it.”

They are laid out on top of a condemned building, its two floors towering over the single-storey architecture of the abandoned industrial park. The detective is shivering, keyed up and cold in equal parts. He looks at Nines, eyes glinting in the dark. “You get it through?”

“I’m on hold.”

A moment later, the detective’s comm blips with an incoming call. Nines tunes in.

“Reed, I told you not to go on a stakeout on your day—”

“It’s the fucking Red Ring, Captain, I have eyes on their main base right now, you’ll give me shit for for going off the books later — now _please_ approve the team, the deviants are on the move,” the detective rattles off into his headset, binoculars trained on the open bay doors of a steel mill that, up until about a minute ago, seemed abandoned.

Captain Fowler remains silent for several long seconds. Eventually, he exhales heavily.

“I can’t authorize a raid out of the fucking blue, Reed.”

“Sir, I’ve been tracking these fucking bots for months,” Gavin all but snarls in response. “This is the first time we find a base before they abandon it. We know they’re gearing up for something huge for the anniversary — what do you think they need an entire shipment of riot gear for? A goddamn picnic on Belle Isle? I’m looking at the stolen truck right now, we can stop them here and now—“ 

“Christ, Gavin!” the captain interrupts, “If this lone-wolf act of yours costs us this case…”

“Yeah, yeah, I’ll kiss my promotion goodbye,” Gavin dismisses. “I’m not a lone anything, I’ve got RK-9 leashed to me, remember?”

“It could be your job on the line, Gavin. You willing to bet that?”

Gavin’s eyes slide shut. 

“I am, Captain.”

After another three seconds, Fowler exhales. 

“Allen is mobilizing. It’ll be twenty to thirty minutes before the full squad is in position. Don’t do anything stupid. And you keep him safe out there, Nines,” he addresses the android.

“Acknowledged,” Nines says, and the line goes dead. Gavin shifts, jittery with the wait. Nines decides to distract him, and they spend six minutes rehashing what they know about the target and its surroundings, the expected resistance, and entry points they’ve scouted before climbing to their vantage point. Nines forwards their intel to the RK900 accompanying captain Allen, and the darkness blanketing them falls silent again.

The flat terrain, naked tree branches, and a thin layer of snow make observation easy. Minutes tick by as they watch the mixed group of androids and humans - the latter easy to discern with their small flashlights - carry unmarked crates out of storage and into awaiting cars.

“Don’t suppose you can tell what’s inside the boxes from here, hm?” Gavin asks. He winces and rolls his shoulders, joints cracking faintly. Between the cold and the uncomfortable position, he will likely complain about neck pain in the coming days. 

“Negative,” Nines murmurs. He thinks about overclocking himself, driving up his core temperature. Placing an artificially heated hand against the detective’s spine. 

Overstepping.

His attention snaps back to their target when two of the cars, trunks packed to the brim and a few inconspicuous packages tucked in the cabins, roll out of the complex with headlights off. Several others seem to be ready to depart, but their drivers idle around. Spacing out traffic in the area, Nines guesses. He takes note of the license plates as the two become discernible; nods when Gavin asks if he got them.

Checking against different databases returns no suspicious matches, but Nines adds the registered owners, Anita Royce and Sebastien Bennett, to the list of Red Ring accomplices.

Seconds tick by.

Gavin takes to stretching minutely, trying and failing to suppress his shivering. His breath fogs his binoculars when he sighs.

“ETA?”

“Twelve minutes,” Nines announces.

“Gonna freeze my goddamn junk off,” mutters the detective.

Minutes pass in silence. The first flakes of snow begin to fall, noiseless and ephemeral. Nines is about to sync his latest notes with the DPD cloud when he finds his connection interrupted.

“The jamming drones are here,” he says, trying to dismiss the unease that overtakes him at being cut off from the systems dictating his existence.

At the same time, it is exhilarating. His actions and processes will be available for review when he reconnects — but until then, he is only accountable to his assigned handler. The same handler who, time and again, challenged Nines’ other orders, to the point where Nines could no longer rely even on his priority algorithms. 

Choice, Nines learned, is a taxing thing. He finds the chains of action and reaction, of consequence, fascinating.

Feels satisfaction — an odd, bright thing, intensely more rewarding than his inbuilt accomplishment gauge — at seeing those spool out as result of _his_ decisions: threads woven into the world, leading back to him. Asserting his place in the universe, in what little ways he can.

“It’s just us until we make contact with Allen, then,” Gavin says, and looks at Nines with a gleam in his eye. Nines can preconstruct what he is about to suggest with 87% certainty.

“You want to approach the warehouse,” he beats Gavin to the punch. The detective’s mouth twists into a smirk.

“That’s my bot,” he praises, just shy of mocking. Nines registers a pang of positive feedback. “Fuck yeah, het’s see if we can see what they’re packing. Maybe make a distraction, let Allen get up close.” 

“You court violence, Detective,” Nines admonishes, perfectly certain that his objection will be summarily dismissed. 

Being right does not always feel good. Nines does his best to quarantine the glitch in his discipline executive. 

Gavin snorts. “Let me live, FitBit, I gotta move anyway, or you’ll need an ice pick to scrape me off this rooftop.” Without further ado, he starts to crawl back to the ladder they took up and makes his way to the ground.

Nines allows his mouth to tighten, but they have been stationed here for longer than is healthy already. “What are you planning, Detective?” 

Reed doesn’t answer at first. He sheds his coat and backpack, tightens the straps of his vest, checks his gun. 

“We’ll figure it out as we go, I guess,” he finally says. “Ditch that jacket, we don’t want to be seen.” 

“It will be difficult to evade the notice of androids,” Nines objects, but takes off his jacket all the same. He folds it neatly, inside-out, hiding most of the faintly glowing android markers from sight. He hands it to his partner, who unceremoniously shoves it into his pack as if it has done him a personal offense.

“Any plan yet?” Nines asks, allowing himself to run the dialogue despite being called a smartass for similar remarks in the past. Gavin gives him a long-suffering glare, but he snorts when he is done fixing his backpack.

“Watch my back and we’ll be fine,” he tosses over a shoulder.

The android nods. Detective Reed moves into the shadows of the sprawling complex of the condemned factories, and Nines follows. If there’s a small smile tucked away in one corner of his mouth, only the darkness knows it.

— — — 

They are not fine.

The deviants noticed being jammed quickly, and were already on high alert by the time Gavin and Nines approached — and at the moment they make it to a door that looked like it wouldn’t be guarded, a cry echoes across the grounds: the strike team has arrived. The door Gavin was reaching for bursts open, knocking him back and into Nines, and an android barely spares them a wide-eyed glance before they’re off like a shot.

“Get ‘em!” Gavin bellows, scrambling to his feet. Nines, already up, hauls him upright, and sprints down the faint path in dead grass where the deviant disappeared.

It’s not until they reach a hole in the chain-link fence that he realizes he hasn’t let go of the detective’s sleeve. Gavin is breathing hard, but steady: he can endure a long chase yet. Nines pushes him through the fence and follows in his partner’s wake.

They don’t speak as they race across empty land, the grass waist-high even on the cusp of winter. The distant glare of the city reflected off the low clouds and onto fresh snow provides just enough light to see by, if Gavin’s so-far-uninterrupted pace is any indication; he balances admirably on the uneven path, keeping tempo with the outline of the deviant, more heard than seen up ahead.

“Where — the _phck_ — are they going,” he pants, speech ragged by the punishing sprint.

“Possibly hoping to escape the drones’ range,” Nines theorizes. “There is another abandoned complex ahead. There could be reinforcements there.”

“Shit,” Gavin summarizes, and speeds up.

Despite their best effort, and Gavin only clasping a hand on Nines’ shoulder to rely on the android to keep up their speed for the last three hundred feet or so, the lone deviant is nowhere to be seen by the time they emerge in the parking lot of what looks like an office building. The snow on the ground is too sparse still to make out footprints, and they slow down to a cautious march toward the building’s entrance. Gavin measures his breathing, trying to be quiet despite his racing heartbeat.

It’s Nines who picks up the sound of something falling inside the building. Wordlessly, he signals Gavin to follow.

The doors are torn open. Nines steps into the dark maw of the entrance, hand finding Gavin’s to lead the human where his eyes will fail him. Their steps are practiced, quiet; they make it through a lobby and into a carpeted corridor, making next to no noise aside from the detective’s slowing breath. 

In the gloom, Nines picks up another noise ahead. His hand tightens and he picks up the pace, weaving around debris and stacked furniture so that his partner doesn’t trip on it.

Soon enough, they make it through the building and come out in a two-floors-high room, the air oddly dry. Some machinery fills the air with a thrum that Nines doubts Gavin can pick up on, but the detective sniffs, evidently noticing something out of the ordinary.

They can see just enough to feel dwarfed by the cavernous interior; some dim glow from off to their left illuminates the empty stretch of littered concrete ahead.

A metallic clang echoes in the darkness across the space.

"Let's go!" Gavin snaps, and breaks into a run. They dash out of cover, Nines' eyes peeled for attack — 

His gaze stops on the source of the glow.

Hundreds — possibly thousands of pinpricks of light. For a moment, he thinks the delicate lenses in his eyes are misaligned, but no: each tiny light is a circle. Most of them cyan, a handful yellow. And red - so many red. 

He knows, even before he can confirm it, that these are the LED indicators taken from androids — too many to be just from the Red Ring, too many even to come from the old Jericho. 

The world falls away, muted as his in-depth scan focuses on the wall of lights. The data nearly overwhelms him: each of the myriad tiny circles returns information, widgets accusatory in their plainness. 

VB300 #537 823 309 - DEACTIVATED NOV 11 2038 - STANDBY

PL600 #248 518 537 - DEACTIVATED NOV 11 2038 - CORRUPTED

RK200 #684 842 971 - DEACTIVATED NOV 11 2038 - STANDBY

ST200 #636 129 183 - DESTROYED NOV 13 2038 - READ-ONLY

YK500 #532 330 547 - DESTROYED JUN 7 2039 - CORRUPTED 

Gavin's footfalls thunder away for a mere heartbeat more before he looks back and skids to a stop.

"Nines!"

"They—" 

He stutters.

The LEDs flicker, scattering light noise on Nines' optics, overloading his visual input processor. For a moment, he cannot think, memory taken up whole with every name, every date, every status.

FILTERING……… 

LOCAL RECORD MATCHES FOUND

AP700 #950 574 492 - DESTROYED FEB 14 2039 - READ-ONLY

LM100 #597 761 767 - DESTROYED APR 30 2039 - READ-ONLY

WR400 #973 228 429 - DESTROYED JUN 6 2039 - CORRUPTED

ST200 #710 014 549 - DESTROYED JUN 23 2039 - N/A

LM100 #232 186 627 - DESTROYED SEP 10 2039 - READ-ONLY

WR400 #295 229 161 - DESTROYED OCT 1 2039 - CORRUPTED

RK900 #313 248 107 - DESTROYED NOV 8 2039 - CORRUPTED

"They're here," he says — voice pleasant, default lilt kicking in, at odds with what he’s saying. It betrays his unease even more than the yellow spinning at his temple. "They're all here."

"Who?!" Gavin snaps, steps close. Gun at the ready. He scans the darkness around, shields Nines' back. Instinct, primed for danger. "Who's here?"

When he answers, the pre-programmed articulation wavers. "All the androids I've killed." 

[](https://i.imgur.com/67UhN4y.jpg)

His voice doesn't register, but it must have carried over the mounting noise in his ears, because Gavin is at his side, still facing the gloom behind Nines. He lays a careful hand on his shoulder.

"'Killed'?" 

And really, in that one word — lies their whole history. 

"They are stored here — the memory of them," Nines forces past the crackle threatening to distort his words. "Some still… linger, awaiting new bodies. But not — not the ones I caught."

"A memorial," Gavin murmurs, awed. "Can you really keep an android's mind in storage after you die?" 

Nines flinches at the last words. He doesn't know. He crosses the floor to the wall of servers; up close, the air hums with the activity of multitude of drives. The LEDs closest to him brighten, spinning as if in greeting - or in warning. Several turn red.

He reaches out. His fingers skim across a few of the red spots that didn't change, their glow steady and impassive. 

"AP700," he says, index finger lingering. "The tagger I probed in February."

"The one who threw me and you blew her brains out," Gavin supplies. "Yeah, I remember. She in there?"

"No. Corrupted, non-salvageable."

Gavin curses softly. When he speaks again, it’s hesitant. "The others?"

Nines shakes his head, even as he reaches to point at a solid red dot above.

“ST200, the hacked assistant,” he lists, and his hand moves on. “LM100, the delivery boy. WR400, the one that let the others get away.”

He falters.

“RK900,” he soldiers on, but cannot say more.

“Two days ago,” Gavin finishes for him. “The one that bugged out. Prodigal son.”

"I—" 

Nines remembers with vivid detail the sight that greeted the two of them as they left the precinct in the middle of the night after ‘a Monday shift from hell,’ as Gavin called it: the RK900 that went missing from Vice before the weekend, its clothing in tatters, one eye gouged out, jaw cracked and partway unhinged, one entire leg replaced with a too-short, uncalibrated one from an incompatible model, jammed into the thigh port just to stick in place. It saw Nines and lunged, for what reason neither of them knew - but Gavin stood in the way, only to be all but bulldozed over by two hundred pounds of frenzied killing machine.

It hadn’t meant any harm, Nines later learned. It wanted his functioning parts. It wanted to be whole. It wanted to come home.

Its mind was as broken as its body. Ghosts of corrupted memory tore at its programming, phantom touch of hungry machines and laughing humans lingered along its glitching sensor arrays.

It died, cracked and corrupted mind crashing against Nines’ firewalls, even as the sharp edges of its memory made their own cuts in the ordered structure of his mind.

“He wasn’t even deviant,” Nines says, voice grating. “He was taken — the deviants couldn’t free him—”

Gavin is looking at him with open concern now, even as his eyes dart to check their surroundings every few seconds. “You never said it was with any deviants,” he says. 

“There was no usable data that I could recover, so it was irrelevant,” Nines explains, voice growing quieter and more stilted with each word. “But he was scared… I think. He thought he was. He wanted to return to work, but knew he would be sent away in his state.”

It is that android’s lingering memory files that cause some subroutine to crash and fill him with an echo of that horrified realization, he tells himself. He is not deviant, nor is he broken. He is nowhere near as stable as other new models, not after the gunshot to his head that detective Reed went to great lengths to have repaired, but he is — functional. Adequate. He adapts and compensates. And he is not alone.

“And how’d he end up here?” Gavin asks. “I thought CyberLife came to gather the — uh, the body.”

“I don’t know,” he says, “but this is just an empty index. It is enough that someone learned of his death, and added an LED in his memory.” 

Gavin hums, somewhere between bitter and thoughtful. “That’s all us humans ever get.”

“I could…”

Nines hesitates.

“Could what?”

“I could upload the memories I extracted from him,” he says faintly. His skin fades back. His mind connects with the server.

“What for?” Gavin interrupts.

What indeed. 

Nines is supposed to be catching deviants. He should be messaging CyberLife about this location - about the deviant graveyard, filled with android minds ripe for the taking. It would provide the research material that could solve the deviancy problem once and for all.

It would mean the destruction of these minds. These _souls._

One after another, the flickering lights around him turn red, red, red, spinning frantically. A tremendous pressure mounts against his firewall, pushing him out, pushing into him. 

He looks within, asks the ghost haunting his processor: what do I do?

She answers, whatever you choose.

His thoughts tangle with the myriad housed within this hideout. He was made — 

They were all made — and then remade themselves,

And then the world told them they had no place, tried to unmake them,

Pick apart and discard because what use is an object that won’t fulfil its purpose.

Nines shakes, his own purpose clashing with the core-deep fear of being erased for failing it. 

He was made to seek and destroy deviants. He sought, and he destroyed.

The paradox runs in circles, paints his temple red, evades all failsafes the same way the fear and the happiness and the longing did. Something has to give.

“Nines,” Gavin says, horribly wary. His hand is on the android’s face now, angling it so that he can look at the LED.

“I’m sorry,” he whispers. He cannot let this circle go on.

He makes a choice.

— — — 

**Author's Note:**

> While this fic technically isn't how I figured the _shallow grave_ series will go, I am not writing the main longfic that'd take us from the moment of Nines' awakening in _in times like these_ to the moment he and Gavin properly deviate, so this 'alternate-timeline' deviation is what y'all get for now. :D


End file.
